Why You Need to Follow Doctor’s Orders After a Car Accident

Seeking medical care and following a proper treatment plan after you’ve been in a car accident is extremely important — and not just for the sake of your health. Personal injury claims can fall apart if the injured party doesn’t seek the right type of treatment at the right time or if treatment is discontinued completely.

Learn more about when you need to seek medical care and why it’s important to follow through with all of your doctor’s orders when you’ve been injured in a car accident.

Seek Medical Care Immediately

There’s a reason your personal injury attorney advises you to seek medical care immediately if you’ve been injured in an accident— whether you think you’re injured or not. Sometimes injury symptoms don’t appear right away, especially symptoms for back injuries and whiplash.

While your doctor’s immediate exam may not prove you have an injury, it does create a record of you seeking treatment after the wreck. Then, if injury symptoms appear several days later and you have to go back to the doctor, he or she will know for sure whether the problem was caused by the accident.

Don’t Skip Follow-Up Appointments

Your follow-up appointments are just as important as your initial exam. If you don’t go to your follow up visits, the insurer could claim that you weren’t injured as badly as you claimed to be, which could lower the amount of your settlement.

Also, when you miss appointments, it could take longer for you to heal. Your doctor orders a specific treatment plan for a reason — to get you healthy.

It’s important to follow your doctor’s orders to ensure any injuries you have healed completely and correctly. This is especially important if your injuries affect your mobility or your ability to work.

Don’t Stop Your Treatment

You shouldn’t stop your treatment until your doctor gives you a clean bill of health. Some people assume that because they feel better, they are fine, but that’s not always the case. You might start feeling better long before your actual injury heals, especially if you’ve had a muscle injury.

That’s why you need to make sure you’re fully healed before resuming a normal schedule helps ensure you don’t have accident-related health problems that creep up in the future.

Also, It’s an insurer’s job to minimize the amount of money an insurance company pays out for each claim. If you stop the treatment plan your doctor ordered it could bring the entire validity of the claim into question.

The insurer might question whether you were actually injured in the accident at all. Or he or she might argue that your injury isn’t as bad as you claimed, which could be a reason for lowering your settlement.

Make Sure You Don’t Have Any Gaps In Treatment

Starting and stopping your medical care isn’t a good idea either. When you do this, it can take longer to heal. But it also gives the insurer a good reason to question your injury claim. The insurer might question if the later medical treatments were necessary to treat your accident injury.

He or she might try to lower the settlement amount citing that your original injury claim was inflated because you felt well enough to miss your doctor’s appointments.

Regardless of their argument, a gap in your medical care timeline that isn’t justified can make your claim fall apart because you aren’t showing a regular, continuous need for medical care or time off work.

Ultimately, when you file a personal injury claim after you’re injured in a car accident, you don’t want to do anything that gives the insurance company a reason to doubt your claim is valid.

That’s why it’s important to stick to your doctor’s treatment plan without missing any appointments without having a good reason.

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About the author

Noelle Kelly

Noelle is a freelance writer working for a variety of businesses across Australia. With a portfolio of work spanning a plethora of countries, industries and companies, she is always looking to broaden her understanding of the business landscape.

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